Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Musil Robert

Author:Musil, Robert [Musil, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935744481
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2012-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

It’s Lovely Here

There are many people who on their vacations are drawn to famous places. They drink beer in their hotel gardens, and if in addition they happen to make pleasant acquaintances, they already look forward to the memories. On the last day of their vacation they go to the nearest stationers; they buy postcards there, and then buy more postcards from the waiter back at the hotel. The picture postcards that these people buy look the same all over the world. They are tinted: the trees and lawns, poison green; the sky, peacock blue; the cliffs are gray and red. The houses are presented in downright painful relief, as though at any moment they might spring up out of the surface; and the color is so intense that a narrow band of it generally forms a contour on the flip side of the card. If the world really looked like that, one could indeed do nothing better than affix a stamp to it and toss it in the nearest mailbox. On these picture postcards people write: “It is indescribably beautiful here.” Or “It’s lovely here.” Or: “Too bad you couldn’t be here with me to see all this beauty.” Sometimes they also write: “You have no idea how beautiful it is here.” Or: “What a swell time we’re having here!”

You really do have to understand these people correctly! They are very happy indeed to be on a vacation trip and to see so many beautiful things that others cannot see; but it causes them pain and embarrassment actually to have to look at these things. If a tower is taller than other towers, a precipice deeper than the common precipice or a famous painting particularly large or small, that is all right, for the difference can be ascertained and talked about; it is for this reason that they tend to seek out a famous palace that is particularly spacious or particularly old, and among landscapes they prefer the wild ones. If you could only trick them about train schedules, hotel rates, and uniforms (but that is just what they would never fall for!), and set them down unawares on a cliff in the Saxon Switzerland, you could no doubt convince them to feel a genuine Matterhorn thrill, for surely Saxony is dizzying enough. If, however, something is not high, deep, large, small, or strikingly painted, in short, if something is not a phenomenon worth talking about, but merely beautiful, they choke – as though on a big smooth bite that will neither go up nor down, a morsel too soft to suffocate on, and too tough to let a word pass. Thus emerge those Oohs! and Ahs!, painful syllables of suffocation. You cannot very well reach with your fingers down your throat; and we have not yet found a better means of getting the necessary words out of our mouth. It isn’t right to make fun of this. Such exclamations express a very painful feeling of constriction.

Experienced art commentators

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